New Releases for The Week of Snipers and Eared Hoodies

PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale is Sony’s decade-late answer to Smash Bros. The game assembles all of the most iconic characters from the most popular PlayStation games, and pits them against one another in a simplified arena. The only mechanic that seems to be different from the classic Nintendo game is that characters get more powerful when they deal damage, rather than getting less powerful when they receive it. Not much else to say about it.

Planetside 2 is a reimagining of the original Planetside game. A large-world, territory control MMO game, players battle it out with thousands of other players at a time, working for one of three factions to claim territory on a distant colony world. The main attractions here are the idea that all of the enemies you come up against are other players—no NPC or monster fights—and that your ability to kill the enemy is based on your skill in the game, rather than a character with experience points and well-built skill trees. The sci-fi theme and fun aesthetics are a plus, and I can imagine that some fairly epic battles will commence, even if they might not be much like the sequence in the trailer.

Hitman: Absolution promises to be a bit more accessible than its previous incarnations. The game continues the story of 47, and is still just as thematically inappropriate as we should expect, but this time the game will be taking cues from other successful stealth action games, and includes all the goodies. 47 will get lots of cover mechanics to help him hide and surprise, new stealthy kill moves to perform, and even an Eagle Vision-esque mode, in which he can see guards and other obstacles highlighted with additional information like patrol paths and awareness levels. If you enjoy stealth games, but haven’t tried Hitman yet—or if you were turned off by the sheer inaccessibility of the earlier Hitman titles—you might want to give this one a shot.

On the goofier side of the road, we’re getting Adventure Time: Hey Ice King! Why’d you steal our garbage?! This adventure game, based on the characters from the comic and cartoon, allows the player to take on the roles of both Jake and Fin as they trek across The Land of Ooo to stop the evil Ice King from turning their garbage into a garbage princess because that would be a bad thing. With gameplay which vaguely resembles Legend of Zelda II—topdown world map, with side-scrolling combat maps—Jake and Fin will meet up with pretty much every character from the Adventure Time books, and help them out with stuff or stop them from being evil. It’s not clear from the press material what the touch screen will be used for.

Following is a full list of this week’s announced North American releases: